Tag: me

list of surprising things today

  • A young guy in a ball cap and sweatshirt and jeans, very typical OC college student type, showed up on the patio and sat outside. He produced from somewhere a bird, a small green one, something similar to a parakeet. Odessa, who was sitting next to me inside, pointed him out. We watched him talk to the bird, who wandered around on the table in front of him and periodically sat on his hand or let him skritch it. He was smoking but keeping the cigarette away from the bird. They appeared to be friends. And then later he walked off towards Wendy’s and we couldn’t see the bird any more. Where’d the bird go? He didn’t look like someone who’d have a bird! What is going on?
  • Jared sent me a Tori Amos video. Yes, that Jared.
  • The apostrophe in “McDonald’s” temporarily broke the large, professional website of the company for whom I work.
  • I read a whole book today. It’s been a while since I did that.

There’s your problem. Someone set this thing to “dorkwad”!

Tomorrow I get an EEG. The object is to find out whether my disastrous brain freakouts have a measurable neurological element that might benefit from neurofeedback or other approaches. It does sound like I fit the profile for this kind of evaluation.

Neurofeedback might be recommended if this is the case; I’m not sure what else they might recommend if I have brain waves that are out of baseline.

This won’t be anything like Laura K’s ordeal; apparently it only takes an hour or so.

Even if it’s a wash, I get a map of my brain. That’s kinda cool.

Beep! click click click

ch linked me to this marvelous antidrug filmstrip from the 1970s. I have so many memories of filmstrips from my grammar school education.

To start with they were the bastard stepchild of movies, which we all loved. On a Friday afternoon we’d hope for a movie. At a minimum there would be entertaining footage of animals or cool science stuff, and if we were lucky we’d convince the teacher to play the movie backwards when it was done for double the movie time and the unstoppable belly laughs we got from watching birds walk in reverse, etc. But if the filmstrip projector came out, we were getting second best. Someone would have to thread the filmstrip into the machine and then help out by pressing the advance button.

Filmstrips were always about the most boring topic available. I remember seeing one about Where Borax Comes From, several detailing How the Indians Ground Up Corn With Rocks, a whole series on How Erosion and Silt Change Our World, and maybe fifty different social science filmstrips about How Some People Live in Big Buildings and Others In Little Huts and related topics.

But the most frequent use of filmstrips was to tell us things the teachers didn’t want to discuss. The nearest we got to sex education, for example, was an extremely medical strip about How Your Bodies Are Changing Now That You’re 12 Or So, with terrifying closeups of peach fuzz stubble and line art of Your Head With Squiggly Red Lines Signifying Emotional Stress. There were separate filmstrips for girls and boys. It was incomprehensible. And of course the drugs ones. I’m not sure I saw this particular drug filmstrip, but we had several on Not Taking Stuff From Big Kids Because It Makes Question Marks Fly Out Your Nose, also known as If You Light Something On Fire and Put It In Your Mouth, You’ll Grow a Leather Jacket and Die in a Car Crash.

I think nowadays teachers put in a videotape and dive under their desks when bad topics arise. But to this day when I hear an old antidrug speech I immediately go to that crappy narrator voice wobbling along with the tape, the piercing beep, and the hum of the fan on the filmstrip machine.

One day the teacher left it on too long on one frame while she explained something and the film caught fire. We all had to go outside while the Fire Department came to check it out. I got a face full of burning plastic film smoke and I was light headed for the rest of the day. Drugs are bad!

Dear the Internet

I just spent the four hours from midnight until now waiting for a large technology company to fix their end of the giant mechanical badger we’re building together so that could start it up again. Waiting for someone else to do something for four hours is much more annoying than working for this amount of time.

During this time my eyes started to really tear up and I decided to remove my disposable contacts. When I went to do so I couldn’t find the left one and thought it had fallen out when I was rubbing my eyes in an irritated way earlier.

Just now, hours later, I discovered that this rogue contact had been hiding in one corner of my eye which is why I still couldn’t see too well and was itchy and wondered if I had Eyeball Rot. But no, there was a small piece of plastic stuck up in a corner there somewhere.

I’d give all of you an eczema update but I think I’ve been erotic enough what with the giant mechanical badger and the eyeball issues.

Good night!

Dream of the wrong D.

I think the last few have been coming directly from some peculiar research facility where they’re beaming Jungian imagery over the internet into my head.

In my dream I’m Apollo chasing Daphne, knowing that she wants nothing to do with me and that she’s going to turn into a damn plant, but this is my role so here I go. It’s all about which arrow hits you. I duck around bushes barely catching sight of her, and then suddenly I run into a clearing.

Only Daphne’s nowhere to be seen, not even as a laurel tree, and there’s some other woman there. Slightly too late I realize this is Diana, oh shit she doesn’t like it when guys show up and BOOM! She turns me into a deer.

A Far Side deer, at that. She wanders off and I sit frustrated on a stump.

Story of my fuckin’ life, man.